Apple disqualifies first person in iTunes contest?
Well, we guess it's partly our fault. We read the rules and showed folks how to enter the Apple iTunes contest for free here, then of course, someone tries to enter 3,000 times and Apple disqualifies them. But the bigger story is if Apple is really counting all the ways they state you can enter equally?
"Natan" writes…
We (me and a friend) entered about 3000 times with the tell a friend option two days ago by using the separated by commas trick. Apple has banned us from emailing anything @ apple.com. They emailed us a copy of the rule that stats no autonomous means to win. We have attempted to email them and correct them that we actually did click the tell a friend button over 500 times (with more than one email in it every time) but they have refused to answer. What should we do? I am fairly certain they would not have contacted us if we had not won…or I could just be dreaming.
We're not sure what to say, cutting and pasting the address dances on the line of automation. Clicking 500 times, yikes- that's some major crack mouse energy. No iPod fo' you!
That said, many people have had concerns about how Apple is actually doing this contest.
One of our readers "Tom" raises some good questions….
It seems to me that there is no way for everything that Apple claims about the competition to be true simultaneously.
Observe:
1) Apple claims that the counter on the front of its website shows the number of songs downloaded.
2) Apple claims that the winners will be the people that download the 100,000th songs etc.
3) Apple claims that the competition is open until the counter displays 100,000,000 songs downloaded.
4) Apple claims that we can enter the competiton by sending mail to itunes100@apple.com [through the tell a friend option].
Given 1) we can infer:
5) The counter does not take into account friend referals.
2) and 5) independently imply:
6) Friend referers can never be on the 100,000 mark and so cannot win prizes.
But 6) is inconsistent with 4). Thus we have an internal logical inconsistency. Something that Apple has said must be false - or so it seems to me.
The way we read the rules (and one of our readers point out)— it's all about the first entry after the 99,999 download for every 100,000 downloads. So it could be a download, or a tell a friend entry. The key thing, is that it has to be the first entry received after the 99,999 download, not the "100,000th download"
Anyone from Apple want to clear this up? Drop us a line..
